Corporate blog of SCHEMA GmbH

Tag Archives: Page Layout Designer

BSH Hausgeräte GmbH is Europe’s largest household appliance manufacturer, with brands such as Bosch and Siemens and products for all areas of everyday life. And because BSH relies on SCHEMA ST4, with 150 technical editors in various locations and around 100,000 “live” publications in up to 50 languages, it is also one of SCHEMA’s biggest customers. Networked home appliances have already been a reality for BSH for some years, and the company is now also preparing for its next developmental leap in technical documentation. If appliances communicate with you, the instructions need to be more than just words on a page – they need to get involved. In other words, they need to be able to respond interactively to your input. At the SCHEMA conference, Saskia Miller and Christina Steidle from BSH gave a presentation on why they decided to implement ST4 and how they are achieving this objective with the XML editing system. Continue reading →

[3] Challenge: Native PDF creation. Answer: The ST4 PDF Engine

Which immediately leads us to the next topic: For the production of PDF files most systems – just like ST4 in the past – rely on external PDF renderers. This is normally not a big problem if it were not for the requirements from item [4] to be fulfilled… But these tools must be purchased, installed for each concurrent user who wants to carry out a layout preview and/or generate a layout. The producer in return must be compatible to several producers of PDF renderers and if necessary support several of their versions with their various bugs. In the end this effort will be paid by the customer.

The process of creating an XSL-FO template and then carrying out a 100% layout production will only make you happy when the layout can actually be produced at 100%. This may sound redundant but in reality many customers find it very problematic to form a set of rules from their actually existing documents, which can then be laid down in the XSL-FO template.